Farewell to Jen McCreight

Jen has been a great voice for the skeptic community for many years. You may know her from her excellent speeches such as the one she gave at Skepticon, or her spearheading of the satirical “Boobquake” event from 2010. Naturally I was extremely surprised by her announcement. As far as I could tell, she seemed to fit right into the culture here at FTB, and nobody was expecting her to walk out on us at this point.

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Update 4/2: Yes, obviously this was an April Fool post. Aren’t you the clever one.

Jen was pretty curt when she announced her departure, so I messaged her on Facebook to see if I could get any more information. I was actually a bit shocked by her reply, but she told me it’s okay if I share it with you, so here is her message to me. I think it speaks for itself.

Russell,

I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’m kind of sick of the ridiculous extremes to which the other Freethoughtblogs participants have taken feminism since I joined up. In fact, thanks to the ham-fisted handling of that whole “Amazing Atheist” incident, I’m seriously reconsidering the feminist label myself.

Do you guys even understand that women aren’t the only ones who are oppressed? There’s this whole movement that’s based on supporting Men’s Rights and I’m totally sympathetic to their concerns. Do you think it’s fair that women like me can’t be drafted for the military, but men can? Do you know how many innocent men are roped into paying child support for children they didn’t intend to have?

As an advocate of equality and fairness for everyone, I can no longer associate myself with a group of people who dismiss so many important issues like that. Even though I was initially critical of Penn Jillette’s friend Mallorie, now I completely get what she meant when she said, “By forgetting to see me as a woman, you have treated me as an equal, as a comrade, as a friend.”

That is something which is completely lacking at FTB. There’s too much focus on gender, too much deference given to Rebecca Watson of all people. Who cares if some guy talked to her in an elevator? All he wanted was some coffee anyway. I’d rather work with Men’s Rights groups to achieve a less uptight atheist movement.

Besides, everybody knows that women in Islamic countries have it much worse than we have it here. These are just first world problems that we’re talking about, they pale in comparison. Actually we should all just agree never to talk about women’s issues in the United States again until every other social problem we have is solved first.

Good luck with your little blogging network anyway. I’m joining the group at avoiceformen.com to show them my support. Hope I’ll see the rest of you there soon.

Also, they promised me a pony.

Cheers!
Jen

What else is there to say? I thought I knew Jen better than this, but I guess we have to respect her wishes. We’ll all miss her.

Poe’s Law: it’s impossible to create a parody so dumb it can’t be mistaken for the real thing. I’ve seen enough stupid antifeminist screeds that I actually took this one for real until I read the comments.

me too, especially since I always wonder what draws people to actually side with MRA etc. (also I have not read blag hag very frequently) This kind of ‘being pushed away’ stuff is exactly how I imagine it works. Which is why I worry about my ability to convince people of things, it is the ‘backfire effect’.

Hee. You have the honor of having been the only person to fool me so far today! I mean, right about the “what about the menz???” stuff I suddenly realized what today was, but damn if you didn’t have me for a minute

“Do you know how many innocent men are roped into paying child support for children they didn’t intend to have?”

I know this is supposed to be satire, and I don’t know how many men actually have to do this (though I know one IRL), but this is still an injustice. Granted, smaller than pretty much any problem women have re: reproductive rights since it doesn’t involve men’s bodies and the system is set up such that it’s not TOO hard to get out of paying child support.

I remember there was a long Godless Bitches discussion on the subject and Tracie brought this up: that there is no sort of “abortion” for men wherein they can sign off on any and all legal responsibilities before the 2nd trimester (or whenever the woman would be able to choose depending on state).

The reason this is satire is because it’s a non-sequiter when used as an argument against feminism. Plenty of feminists *do* care genuinely about teh menz.

This is an interesting problem, I would be very interested to see solutions to it. However, if every solution leaves one member with the short end of the stick, then I’m wondering which imperfect system is the lesser of the two evils. I keep thinking that the injustice done to men occasionally with this system is far less than the injustice that would be done to many women in other solutions.

^ Not necessarily but the “Men’s Rights Activists” more properly known as Male Supwemaciwsts certainly are.

But speaking of jokes. Hah. Okay. Yeah, I came here to find Greg Laden telling me Crommunist is leaving having realised there’s no such thing as “colour” and Crommunist telling me he and Lousy Canuck have fought and LC is leaving and Assassin Actual telling me that Justin Griffith is leaving and, yep, I know what day it is. And I don’t believe a word .. Well not after the first one anyone. Okay, y’all had me going just a little for just a while.

For some reason, I decided to follow the entire daisy chain – i.e. each blog posted on the following blog as to why it was leaving FTB. I thought the RBB post on the loss of the AE was the most creative, so I will start with him:

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[…] you stopped by the blog yesterday, and said to yourself “Hah! Jen McCreight obviously wouldn’t join the Men’s Rights movement! I am not fooled at all!”… and then you patted yourself on the back and closed the […]

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